Twice in 1961, Houbolt, a tough-minded infighter, was almost fired for skipping proper channels and writing directly to Seamans about his LOR proposal. By the end of the year, Webb and von Braun leaned toward Houbolt’s lunar orbit rendezvous plan as the best option. What won both him and Kennedy over was that LOR required only one Saturn rocket. What he didn’t know until late in his presidency was that the official name of the jumbo Apollo moon rocket was Saturn V. In the next few months, Kennedy and Webb came to believe that von Braun’s Saturn I turned Saturn IB was his ticket to the moon. And if the United States truly wanted to land astronauts on the moon, LOR was the ticket to ride. Although Houbolt’s plan occasioned fierce, ongoing debate, by the summer of 1962 it became the decided strategy for the Apollo mission.
EVEN WHILE THE flight mode controversy raged, nearly everyone could agree on one thing: that von Braun’s eventual Saturn rocket would invariably have to be one of the most ingenious technological innovations of the twentieth century. Von Braun’s Saturn V moon rocket didn’t fly until 1967. At the time of Kennedy’s speech to Congress, von Braun was still building the Saturn I, the first of which flew in October 1961.
Just hours after Kennedy finished speaking to Congress, test pilot Joe Walker flew an X-15 rocket plane from Edwards Air Force Base in California, traveling five times the speed of sound. This was a new record for a vehicle operated by a human occupant (versus the rockets that carried Shepard and Gagarin, who had little or no control, respectively, over their flights). Almost without exception, the next day’s newspapers ran the summary of the president’s address next to the more immediately exciting news of the X-15 and its zooming pilot. To the air force, Walker’s record-breaking flight was further proof that the reusable X-15 was more important for the future of space exploration than von Braun’s single-use Saturn rockets. To Kennedy, who’d just staked his presidential reputation on the goal of a rocket-powered moon mission, the timing of Walker’s X-15 flight could not have been pleasing.
IN THE AFTERMATH of his May 25 speech, Kennedy turned his attention to his upcoming summit with Khrushchev in Austria, where sensitive topics such as the status of divided Berlin would likely overshadow his push for a U.S. moonshot. Still, his speech at least assured the world that the American commitment to space was second to none. Publicly, the Soviets feigned good wishes to the United States regarding its highly implausible lunar initiative, and some scientists working internationally suspected that Moscow was secretly delighted by it—and had even been maneuvering America into just such a plan. These scientists theorized that a laser-like concentration on the moon would distract American focus, funding, and brainpower from more practical military projects, such as aircraft carriers and ICBMs.
At the two leaders’ introductory luncheon on June 3, the day before the Vienna summit officially opened, Kennedy brought up the safe topic of Gagarin’s flight of two months before. Bursting with pride, Khrushchev described the flight, with a friendly tidbit about all of the trepidation the Soviet leaders had that the beloved cosmonaut would lose his mind from the effects of space. Instead, he noted, there was no problem, and Gagarin even sang folk songs among the stars. Inevitably, the two men began talking about the Americans’ grand design for a trip to the moon. “With respect to the possibility of cooperation in launching a man to the Moon,” noted the State Department’s official memo about the conversation, “Mr. Khrushchev said that he was cautious because of the military aspect of such flights.”
Just what Khrushchev meant by that was not recorded, but the notion succeeded in putting Kennedy on the defensive. He responded with an “inquiry” to Khrushchev “whether the US and USSR should go to the Moon together.” The world would have toasted these Cold War rivals collaborating on a moonshot, but Khrushchev demurred. “At first he said no,” according to the account of their conversation, “but then said ‘all right, why not?’” though his first answer was clearly his last. Asked later about the discussion by his son Sergei, Khrushchev admitted that “if we cooperate, it will mean opening up our rocket program to them. We have only two hundred missiles, but they think we have many more.” Khrushchev worried that Kennedy might launch a first ICBM strike if the disparity were revealed. “So when they say we have something to hide . . . ?” Sergei pressed.
“It is just the opposite,” his father said with a chuckle. “We have nothing to hide. We have nothing. And we must hide it.”
For the next two years, the president would periodically send up a trial balloon for the idea of a joint U.S.–Soviet moon venture, then back off and reiterate the national security necessity of being first to the moon. These inconsistencies, which space historian William Kay sorted into the categories of “competition” and “cooperation,” place the space race firmly in the context of the Cold War. Kay contends that it was in fact a two-pronged strategy designed to keep the United States on the positive side of world opinion by appearing (as in Vienna) to value peace above all else. Kennedy’s words were about peaceful coexistence in space while his actions were aimed at America’s winning the race. With Cold War competition running hot over Berlin, Cuba, and Southeast Asia, Kennedy could and did extend the bauble of outer space collegiality and collaboration as a means of ameliorating the very real aggressions that existed between Washington and Moscow—a peaceful gesture that sacrificed nothing on the broader scale, and couldn’t be interpreted as a sign of weakness.
The rest of the Vienna summit did not go as well as the luncheon. Khrushchev was domineering and unyielding on most subjects, especially about wanting the NATO nations to leave Berlin. When JFK tried to frame the division of the city in moral terms, he left the impression that the United States would take no offensive action in response to East Germany’s threats to cut West Berlin off from the West. This rhetorical error didn’t go over well. “Mr. Kennedy’s reaction was not unlike that of many Western officials who have negotiated with the Russians for the first time,” wrote James Reston of the New York Times. “He approached the conversations thinking he knew what to expect. But nevertheless, he was astonished by the rigidity and toughness of the Soviet leader.” Privately, the president mumbled to Reston, “He just beat the hell out of me. I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts.” That assessment, blunt and honest, was shared by other Washington insiders. Khrushchev had belittled Kennedy in Vienna by threatening to crush America in Berlin.
The summit had been a bust, and America’s geopolitical problems quickly got worse. In Berlin, giant construction machines were getting gassed up and wall-building materials were stockpiled along the border between East and West. In his May 25 speech, Kennedy had spoken of failure as a matter of missing an arbitrary deadline. During the grim hours after meeting Khrushchev in Austria, the president saw more clearly what failure could be. In this tense Cold War environment, a shooting war seemed just one poorly chosen word away. It turned out, however improbably, that Kennedy’s moonshot pledge had given the United States the upper hand over the USSR in the psychological game of one-upmanship. If the Americans were playing defense in Berlin, they were, by contrast, on the offense in the fields of manned space-reconnaissance aviation, satellites, ICBMs, and moonshots.
John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the Vienna summit on June 4, 1961.
© Cornell Capa © International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos
A U.S. Marine Corps helicopter lifts astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom from the Atlantic Ocean after his Liberty Bell 7 capsule lands, following a suborbital flight. President Kennedy would telephone Grissom aboard the USS Randolph to congratulate him on surviving the ordeal.
Bettmann/Getty Images
14
Moon Momentum with Television and Gus Grissom
The truth was that the fellows had now become the personal symbols not only of America’s Cold War struggle with the Soviets but also of Kennedy’s own political comeback. They had become the pioneers of the New Frontier, recycled version.
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—TOM WOLFE, THE RIGHT STUFF (1979)
In the spring of 1961, on a limousine ride from the White House to the National Association of Broadcasters meeting with Johnson, Shepard, and FCC chairman Newton Minow, President Kennedy cracked a telling joke at the vice president’s expense: “You know, Lyndon,” he said with sly delight, “nobody knows that the vice president is Chairman of the Space Council. But if [Shepard’s] flight had been a flop, I guarantee you that everybody would have known you were the chairman.” Laughter filled the car, but LBJ wasn’t amused. Minow, the quick-draw wit, deadpanned, “Mr. President, if the flight would have been a flop, the vice president would have been the next astronaut.”
Humor’s best when laced with truth, and Johnson knew Kennedy really would have made him the sacrificial lamb if Freedom 7 had ended in disaster. The mocking tone of the president’s tease, with its implication of superiority, stung LBJ. Back in 1957, when JFK was deriding failed Vanguard launches, Johnson had been the driving force in the Senate behind the establishment of a civilian-run NASA. While Johnson had met with ex-Peenemünders numerous times to discuss the nuances of rocketry, Kennedy had focused on the alleged missile gap. From Sputnik onward, Johnson had championed NASA as a potential bonanza of tech-driven wealth for numerous states. “Space was the platform from which the social revolution of the 1960s was launched,” LBJ explained in his memoir, The Vantage Point. “If we could send a man to the moon, we knew we should be able to send a poor boy to school and to provide decent medical care for the aged.”
So LBJ was paradoxically pleased yet galled that JFK had assumed the mantle of “President Moonshot,” stealing all his space policy thunder. In a debate on the minutiae of space exploration, Johnson probably would have outshone Kennedy. But the vice president never got such an opportunity, and he learned to hide his low-burning resentment, serving as a loyal New Frontier soldier for the good of the nation. Playing second fiddle, often out of the White House loop, a frustrated Johnson used leverage over NASA administrator James Webb and Senator Robert Kerr to help make sure that NASA’s proposed Manned Spacecraft Center would be built in Houston. “Many friends of Lyndon Johnson and [Congressman] Albert Thomas made a hell of a lot of money when Houston was selected,” astronauts Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton wrote in their dual memoir. “Those already wealthy smiled as their coffers bulged with new funds.”
FOR ALL JOHNSON’S political acumen, he never cottoned to the fact that horse-trading and arm-twisting had taken a backseat in politics to being telegenic and delivering a good sound bite. By a long shot, Kennedy was the best communicator of his generation, able to conquer the moon and stars with uplifting oratory and a photogenic smile—skills in which Johnson was sorely lacking. Off camera, Johnson had a captivating way of speaking, peppering his commentary with off-color anecdotes and hoarse laughter. But when the camera ticked on, he seemed tongue-tied, uncomfortable in his own skin, too gravel-road Texan by half.
Kennedy was the apotheosis of a revolution started by Franklin Roosevelt, using media—in this case, TV—to move the presidency closer to the American people than ever before. In the early days of the republic, citizens could just drop in on Presidents Jefferson, Monroe, or Tyler at the Executive Mansion. As the country grew, the president became more isolated, particularly after the assassinations of Lincoln and Garfield. Between 1933 and 1945, though, President Roosevelt became a staple presence in American homes via thirty “fireside chat” radio broadcasts, which he used to explain major New Deal and World War II policy decisions in a conversational rather than oratorical style, as if talking one on one with every American.
By the early 1950s, as TV gained cultural power, presidential aspirants suddenly had to be telegenic. Dwight Eisenhower treated TV as a fad, a radio with images, but nevertheless sought to master it by appointing actor-director Robert Montgomery as a White House consultant, taking the Hollywood veteran’s advice on how to relax for the camera. Under Montgomery’s guidance, Ike undoubtedly improved between 1953 to 1961, but he was limited by looks, delivery, and temperament. Had Hollywood cast Ike in movies, it would have been as a Midwestern banker or the principal of a Pennsylvania military school.
Kennedy, on the other hand, didn’t need coaching. Television was familiar turf for him, and he had an inexhaustible fascination with the medium, especially after broadcasts became one of the most potent weapons in his presidential campaign. TV had been a boon for him in the Senate as well: in February 1957, when the McClellan Committee hearings probing corruption in labor unions were broadcast live, Americans got their first sustained exposure to Kennedy, young, calm, and handsome beside his staid and wizened colleagues. The most telegenic politician of his era, or perhaps any era, Kennedy formed an instant partnership with TV that would last the rest of his life.
San Francisco sociologist Don Mahan never knew Kennedy personally, but “somehow I had come to know this man as a fellow human being, as a friend, as trite as that may sound. . . . I do not believe that this situation is at all unique with me.” The medium, Mahan explained, seemed to amplify JFK’s stature. “Maybe I watch more newscasts and special news reports than the average television viewer,” he noted, “but even the average viewer has to be aware of John Kennedy as he was around so much. I am sure that he was entirely conscious of the potential of the medium.”
Every part of the way Kennedy comported himself on TV was riveting and irresistibly kinetic, with a naturalness and energy that cut right through the dull, ordinary hum of late-1950s political discourse. Kennedy brought verisimilitude to the small screen, showing a levelheaded persona shaped by all the influences and events of his life: the hard-driving family, the Ivy League education, his wartime heroism, and his Catholic idealism. Playing to his father’s sense of assurance and taking lessons in schoolboy popularity from his brother Joe Jr., JFK had learned to flip from introvert to extrovert when the occasion demanded. By all accounts, his two siblings who died young, Joe Jr. and Kathleen (“Kick”), were better equipped by nature to shine in social settings, but Jack learned to keep up, ultimately transforming from sickly and standoffish youngster to athlete and life of the party—and learning that he enjoyed it. While his early days in Congress suggested he still might have been happiest alone with a pile of books and newspapers, his evolving sense of self finally coalesced into the cool persona Americans came to know through their living room TVs in the early 1960s: charming, accomplished, and slightly detached, embodying good taste, erudition, up-tempo pragmatism, and apparently effortless grace.
Arriving at the White House with confidence born of his perceived wins against Richard Nixon in their televised debates, Kennedy immediately tapped into one of the basic truths of TV’s ravenous appetite: a measure of spontaneity is worth the risk of gaffes. Starting on January 25, 1961, he began holding regular televised news conferences, bringing unscripted and unrehearsed banter to the usually sober world of broadcast news. The effect was seismic, and sometimes a cause for worry, too, among his die-hard supporters. Would he make a mistake? Bungle a policy idea? Or simply wear out his welcome in American homes? Pierre Salinger, the White House press secretary, had originated the idea of televising the conferences, and according to him, “Kennedy felt very strongly that he should go ahead.”
Kennedy was smart to trust Salinger’s instincts. The press conferences, typically scheduled for late afternoon, were staged on average every sixteen days. The American people had never before witnessed their president fielding questions like a shortstop, displaying not only his knowledge (or admitted ignorance) of a vast array of issues, but his diplomacy in choosing precisely how to respond. It was much like the Mercury Seven manned space launches from Cape Canaveral: you knew the time to tune in but not what would ultimately happen. Within any one press conference, JFK would whiff or make outright factual mistakes, but he would also display flashes of pluck under verbal fire, along with irresistible wit. Some questions pleased him, a few rankled—and in each case, the audience could sens
e his genuine feelings. Overall, even the president’s detractors had to admit that he handled the majority of the press’s questions with well-chosen words, a raised eyebrow, or a half smile that communicated clearly what he thought about a particular issue. What was more, he kept his answers brief, avoiding that enemy of all good TV: unconstructed rambling.
On average, the press conference broadcasts drew about eighteen million viewers, which Salinger considered fantastic. Some observers caught on to the potential of the televised news conference immediately. Washington correspondent Virginia Kelly, for one, pointed out in the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram that Kennedy’s extemporaneous speaking, so rare compared with most previous presidents, would inevitably “reveal his innate characteristics clearly.” She noted that his voice, along with his “personal mannerisms, facial expressions, gestures and all the intangibles of personality,” impacted the points he made. She evoked a comment he made about Soviet activities in the Congo: “in cold print,” she said, his words seemed dark and “stern,” conveying “a solemn warning”; on TV, however, the tone of his voice made the statement seem “firm but temperate.” For that reason, Kelly predicted that the press and public would seek out both versions of the president’s news conferences. The words mattered, but as of 1961, so did their delivery.
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